Music
I
now have a Soundcloud page here:
http://soundcloud.com/amused
My TINDECK page has some more recent
pieces - more to add soon:
Fuller descriptions
of several pieces and some older works are below:
This
is a musical journey into hell. Starting with 7 seconds of spin
then spinning out of control, ending with the bombs falling on
Babylon.
Based on just
one 7 second sample from a George W
Bush speech where he says "We've had no evidence that Saddam
Hussain was involved in September 11th". Then treated with a
variety of granular effects in Reaktor
the various takes layered and mastered in Tracktion.
No synths or
other sounds involved every sound, tonal
and non tonal is derived from that one sample of Bush's voice treated
in various ways - I never realised he could sound so musical!
This
is a piece made with Native Instruments
Massive to show off its gentler side.
I
started work on these in the aftershock of the Asian tsunami.
Although not originally intended as one piece I feel they form
counterparts so keep them together. Composed using a limited palette
of sounds (mostly with a haunting voice like quality) and with a
restricted range of expression - they express emotion through their
subtlety of tonal variation rather than through grand gesture.
Instruments
used - Zarg
Solaris 3 -
Mastered in Tracktion 2
using Flatblaster
2 (from NI Reaktor 5)
Transformation
struggling to make music with a broken hand
then
making that struggle into music. Like musical Raku - the flaws help
bring it to life. "Insects" courtesy of DFX Transverb.
A
dada piece based on an excerpt from a reading and lecture by Anselm
Hollo; focusing on his early years and the historical movement and
influence of dada, recorded by the Jack
Kerouac
School
of
Disembodied Poetics.
There are two
vocal sample based tracks
- each resonating with but offset from the other. I've tried to
preserve one of the tracks intact and mirrored it with a Grainstates
track offset a few bars. I love Hollo's voice and delivery and didn't
want to mess too much with that. Strangely I recorded the ambient
background and Pianoish bit first and was pleased to find that when I
edited and trimmed the section of his lecture I wanted to use (which
is about an hour long in total) it fitted remarkably well. I thought
it was more in keeping with Dada approaches and "found"
sounds to do it this reversed way than to simply follow the speech
patterns in the music.
Made with
Tracktion and several
Reaktor ensembles.
Piano(ish)
sounds - Amphitryon
Bleeps,
twangs and background ambience - Twanger (2 tracks)
Processed
vocal sample - Grainstates FX
Mastering
Flatblaster
A
conversation between a Melancholic piano and Spektral
Delay.
Sort
of jazzy Reaktoria - saxlike solo built up over a kind of smudged
drum-n-bass-ish texture.
Ten
Bagatelles 1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
This
is a series of ten short sketches made while playing around with DFX
Transverb
and
making patches.
Each piece uses a different patch and the mood is set by my response
to the patch. They are intended as musical conversations between
myself and transverb so they have a loosely contrapuntal form. Each
piece is one minute long.
When I paint I
tend not to use
frames or regular edges and I wanted each piece to be similar in that
each piece has no clearly defined beginning or ending using standard
musical conventions like fade ins/outs, intros or conclusions
music without frames. I just set EnergyXT
to record for a minute and with some even began playing before
pressing record and most just cut off when it gets to the end of the
minute. Think of them as if you are just catching a snapshot of a
conversation between two people as you walk past them.
They
could even be looped to continue playing indefinitely.
This
is a piece in the vein of "Donut" - another DADA inspired
piece using found samples of a speech treated using Reaktor's
granular effects and built up into layers. As before the aim was to
interact musically with the speech patterns and content but without
intentionally writing a "backing track" - rather the
musical elements were created seperately and fitted afterwards based
largely on meter.
Although
originally intended as a satirical piece I found myself captivated by
this woman's little quirks of speech - which the granular layers pick
out and accentuate - and although it has a funny and absurd side to
it I get a real feeling of poignancy and sadness from it too. A
homage to days that never were.
More
pretty moody stuff
Two
one minute long tone poems based on impressions of the great
semi-autobiographical novel by Herman Hesse.
Almost
"pretty" compared to everything else here :) Just
improvising to one of Harm
Vissers
lovely
physically modelled patches for Tassman
4 "Steel
string"
Also
improvised using one of Harm Vissers patches for Tassman
a clarinet (clarinet 2) I found to my delight that this
patch
exhibits some seriously non-linear behaviour when pushed so I pushed
it a lot and got some wonderful bloops and blurps as well as some
very non-clarinet like sounds and a few extremely loud and nasty
noises too so watch your speakers!
TimeCloud
- 1
Nothing
much happening here this is all about being, not doing.
Composed using a semi algorithmic approach.
Infinity
- 1
-
2
-
3
3
more minimalistic (self-similar) algorithmic pieces - each 20
minutes long.
Composed
in a semi-trance state using Tassman 4 and just letting go
playing a repetitive phrase with my left hand and improvising around
it with the right creating resonances, harmonics and
feedback
along the way.
I
made this a while back and just came across it again I
cant
remember what I used for this but I think it was something from
Reaktor.
These
are not based on the whole trilogy but on the sequence near the end
where Neo and Trinity are searching for the Machine City
made
using single presets from EVE
A
galaxy in a grain of sand
All
just sketches and demos made while making presets
for
a new soundbank for Dash
Signature EVE
Henry
Cow inspired guitar chaos
Stephen
Wey
2010
Fingermarks.co.uk